Cassadaga
- Bright Eyes
- Band Name: Bright Eyes
- Record Label: Saddle Creek
- Release Date: Apr 10, 2007
- Critic Score
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The music doesn't always live up to the demands of the journey, but Oberst's trembling, vulnerable voice carries through to a rewarding conclusion.
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91On Cassadaga, classic sounds are resurrected in a satisfying swirl of country, gospel, cinematic pop, and of course, electro-folk.
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More sonically and lyrically ambitious than 2005’s I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and more fully realized than the scattershot Digital Ash In A Digital Urn, Cassadaga is Oberst’s most affecting and challenging full-length to date, and proves that he’ll be a defining figure in folk music for many years to come. [#17, p.83]
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90Cassadaga is an assured and accomplished album; a classic constructed from classic elements.
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Musically, it's his richest album yet, full of Nashville twang and Branson brassiness. And lyrically, the itinerant-traveler conceit is intriguing, even though its sweeping scope lacks the almost masochistically intimate power of earlier material.
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This is about as close to a bid for mainstream acceptance as you're going to get from Bright Eyes.
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80Heartfelt, honest and compelling, "Cassadaga" is garnished with melodies so lush that Bright Eyes' ascent to the next level of recognition is absolutely assured.
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80Cassadaga is an album to warm souls, rally minds and break hearts in equal measure. [May 2007, p.110]
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80Cassadaga is fulsome, epic, and swirling, by far Oberst's most sophisticated, seamless effort. [May 2007, p.89]
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80At once apocalyptic and born again. [May 2007, p.96]
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The band's fullest and most developed record to date.
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80It's about 15 minutes and three songs too long. [May 2007, p.117]
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Musically, Cassadaga is fully formed, a considered synthesis of the catch-as-catch-can expansiveness of Oberst's Lifted-era bands with the country tendencies that have always undergirded his Middle American vocals.
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80Oberst's countryish genre studies have deepened with a very adult loneliness. [Apr 2007, p.89]
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[Cassadaga] finds Oberst cultivating a sophistication usually found in records made by people old enough to be his grandparents. [May 2007, p.150]
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80Oberst's frequent comparisons to Bob Dylan won't suffer, but he has also conjured up some of his best tunes, especially Hot Knives and If the Brakeman Turns My Way, with themes of alienation and self-medication.
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80Cassadaga is everything his fans would expect from him - mournful, moody and full of lovely melodies.
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One hopes that the next LP will pack a little less filler, and Bright Eyes will drop a 40-minute work as tight as their best four-minute works.
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80Fantastic lyrical concepts, an improved musicianship and the addition of an orchestra make Cassadaga easily the most enjoyable Bright Eyes album as a whole.
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80"Cassadaga"... delivers on the wildly unlikely promise that very young, very gifted artists can grow up without losing their balance.
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Cassadaga represents a next phase, one that will prove enduring even as the kids latch onto their next rock 'n' roll savior.
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A restless, questing work.
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70A pretty decent album with a lot of filler.
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70An ambitious, twangy and faintly psychedelic folk-rock set that still may not convince haters he isn't a twerp. [May 2007, p.102]
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As ambitious as this album is, there's a surprising lack of anguish on display. [Apr 2007, p.54]
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Cassadaga, while not exceptional in Oberst's canon, demonstrates a maturity that ensures his legacy beyond emo-folk.
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It isn't that Cassadaga is necessarily bad, but where I'm Wide Awake was compact and graceful, the new record lumbers, belaboring Conor Oberst's anguish about the state of the world.
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60The political lyrics are the most troublesome.
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60'Cassadaga' is much less of a draining emotional journey for both chief player and listener alike than Bright Eyes previous work.
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60Oberst's political criticism is most effective when he's humble and straightforward, yet his overwrought poetics seem laughable, childish and blinkered when applied to world affairs.
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60It's a pleasant enough, if uneven work. [14 Apr 2007]
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On Cassadaga Bright Eyes sounds like John Mayer.
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Cassadaga falters in the same way I’m Wide Awake did: by trying to present his views as universal, it just exposes how Conor Oberst can’t handle the Truth.
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He is clearly searching for a more mature style. But the musical and rhetorical convolutions of “Cassadaga” are no substitute, yet, for the way he used to blurt things out. [9 Apr 2007]
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"Cassadaga" is an insular, self-referential album that strives for depth and profundity and sounds instead like a high-school poetry reading, full of rhyming-dictionary couplets and banal pronouncements about life.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 46 out of 61
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Mixed: 9 out of 61
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Negative: 6 out of 61
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Steve9
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darrylf10best album of this year so far
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jw8